Hack24 API Challenge

During this 24 hour coding competition, teams of 4 compete to win exclusive prizes, by showcasing their innovative ideas and raw tech talent!

Set in Nottingham's Creative Quarter, this will definitely be an exciting Hackathon to be a part of.

How to get involved?

7digital folk listen up, now we've set an API challenge as described below; we're looking for 4 people to form a team - it doesn't matter what your specialism is, what department you're in, a team formed of product, systems, data and dev people might be just as good as 4 hardcore h4xx0rs.

Challenge: Build a context-based or thematic music application, service or store using the 7digital API augmented with data or APIs from at least one other source.

Context is key to the new wave of music applications. All you can eat music or massive download catalogues are hard to navigate and only let people discover what the retailers think they should. With the onset of wearable technology, open access to contextual data from the internet of things and the general increase in availability of processable data, we can now inform decisions in real-time based on the context in which that person, action or event exists.

Imagine that your music choices could be informed by the weather, or the city you're currently in, or the fact that your friends are all talking about the latest band. What if your music app knew you were running, or cycling, or dancing? Consider that you might want to only listen to rock, or classical, or Christian music or music from bands formed in Nottingham. We have 32 million available tracks to play, but you'll not want to listen to all of them (that's about 369 years of listening) so picking themes is important, and playing them based on the listeners current situation makes them even more important.

The 7digital API allows you to search, list by genre, purchase, preview and stream from our worldwide music catalogue. Couple this with another API or data source, using our partners like MusicBrainz, our matching API, or by combining another API through text searching, and you should be able to create something unique.

Today marks the beginning of the Technical Academy Tour as Academy Coordinator, Miles Pool, VP Technology, Paul Shannon and later, former apprentice, Mia Filisch head out across the UK to talk about our Technical Academy.

Continuous learning has always been part of the culture at 7digital and the Technical Academy allowed us to focus those ideas and start hiring apprentices. Changing the team entry requirements and providing a defined period of training allowed us to attract people from more diverse backgrounds and has increased the proportion of female developers in our team; it’s also strengthened the culture of learning and knowledge sharing at every level.

Since I started at 7digital I’ve loved our belief in continuous improvement. Throughout our history as a company we have had a number of influential women working in various parts of organisation yet I knew there was more we could do to improve the diversity of our tech team.

Here at 7digital, we see the relationship between the customer and the developer as one of the most important aspects of software development. We treat software development as more of a craft than an engineering discipline. Craftsmen back in the day would have constant communication with their customers, receiving regular visits from their customer to discuss progress and alterations as the item takes shape.

Over the last twenty years, the agile software movement and extreme programming in particular has championed this with its short iterations, customer showcases and active customer participation in the creation of features.

7digital software developer Mia Filisch attended the October 28th Velocity conference in Amsterdam. She was kind enough to share her account of the core takeaways here with us. She found that the core recurring theme around security was enough to inspire some internal knowledge sharing sessions she has already started scheming on. The diversity of insights led to a productive and informative conference. See below for her notes.